Three hundred meters, for fighters of this level, was nothing more than a heartbeat.
The black mass beneath Ith's feet suddenly accelerated, shooting toward the Black Dragon in the sky like an arrow loosed from the string.
Marleen stepped across the sea seven times in a row, her body twisting midair three times to take a sharp flanking angle from the other side.
Their attacks arrived almost in perfect sync.
Ith's book snapped open to a particular page as he chanted obscure syllables under his breath.
The air around him began to distort. Seven whips of force reached out of the void, lashing toward the joints of Bullet's wings from seven directions.
"Mind Bind, Sevenfold Shackles."
Ith nudged his glasses up, the lenses flashing coldly.
"Designed specifically for the joints of large creatures."
At the same time, Marleen had already leapt to a height level with the dragon.
She drew her third and fourth curved blades. Four sabers spun in her hands, whirling into a silver ring of light.
A dark red aura of blood seeped along the edges of the blades.
This was Blood Edge Armament, refined from the slaughter of countless victims by a special method.
"Blood Moon Dance, Meat Grinder."
Four crimson arcs of blade light crossed in front of her.
These slashes were not just sharp, they carried a strange corrosive property. Even the air seemed to hiss as they cut through it.
Front and back, the pincer left no room to retreat.
Yet Bullet's expression remained calm.
He did not even glance at Marleen's attacks. All of his attention was locked on Ith's energy whips.
In the lens of parsing type Observation, the structure of those seven whips was peeled apart layer by layer.
They were not pure energy and not condensed Haki. They were the manifestation of mental power.
Each whip was woven from hundreds of thinner strands of spiritual filament. The structure was precise but fragile. Damage the key nodes and the whole thing would collapse.
The Black Dragon suddenly shook both wings.
High frequency vibration.
Every tremor of the wing membranes landed exactly on the "nodes" of the seven whips.
Ith's expression changed.
He felt his mental bindings being torn apart by brute force.
Pop. Pop. Pop...
Seven soft snapping sounds rang out in quick succession. All seven whips disintegrated at once.
Ith grunted, blood spilling from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth.
When a mental attack breaks, the backlash is brutal.
By then, Marleen's four blade waves were already almost on top of Bullet.
He did something that seemed impossible.
In midair, he twisted into a roll. His massive dragon body moved like a boneless soft creature, contorting itself through the narrow gaps between the four arcs.
The blade light scraped across his scales, leaving four faint white scratches on the Black Scale Armament, and nothing more.
"What?"
Marleen's pupils shrank.
Her Blood Edge Armament could corrode steel as if it were nothing, yet it had only managed to scratch this monster's scales?
Bullet did not give her time to react.
As he slipped past the blade waves, his tail snapped out like a whip, its target her waist.
Marleen was a veteran predator and reacted on pure instinct, crossing her two blades to block.
She still underestimated the force in that tail.
Clang.
The crash of metal rang out, and Marleen was blasted away like a cannonball. She carved a white scar more than several hundred meters long across the sea surface before she finally managed to steady herself.
She looked down at the blades in her hands. Cracks had already opened along their edges.
"Monster..."
She spat blood, her eyes turning grave.
Ith had already rallied himself.
His book flipped to yet another page, and this time the words he chanted came even faster.
Three additional phantoms were "squeezed" out of his body.
Each phantom had a different face and expression: rage, sorrow, ecstasy, serenity.
Multiple personalities, made manifest.
"Four Aspect Assault."
All four Ith's spoke at once, their voices overlapping like a chorus.
The four shades rushed Bullet from four angles.
Each attacked in a different style. The rage aspect's fists were brutally direct, the sorrow aspect's techniques were soft and flowing, the ecstasy aspect moved at bewildering speed, and the serene aspect was solid and unshakable.
A flicker of interest crossed Bullet's eyes.
The four phantoms were weaker than the original, but their teamwork was sharp, their angles clever. They were troublesome.
The Black Dragon suddenly climbed.
All four phantoms chased after him.
Just as they were about to complete their encirclement, Bullet made a move no one expected.
He stopped climbing and dropped straight down.
Not toward the phantoms.
Not toward Ith himself.
Toward the sea.
"Trying to run?" Ith frowned.
But running had never been Bullet's goal.
At thirty meters above the water, he opened his jaws and aimed at an enemy ship that was just bringing its guns to bear. Then he unleashed a tightly compressed sonic blast.
Roar.
It was louder than any dragon roar he had released so far.
The sound turned into a tangible, conical shockwave and slammed straight into the ship's deck.
The gunners' eardrums burst instantly. Blood streamed from their ears, eyes, and noses as they dropped in a heap.
More terrifying still, the sonic shock triggered a structural resonance in the hull.
Crack, crack...
Spiderweb fractures crawled across the wooden planks, and the ship fell apart immediately after.
Fifth ship, disintegrated.
At the same moment he spat the sound cannon, Bullet's wings snapped open. His body drew a sharp angle through the air and slipped out of the gap in the four phantom's encirclement.
He hooked back in a tight curve and drove his claws toward the nearest aspect, the one of ecstasy.
Rip.
His talons punched straight through the phantom's chest.
The sensation was strange.
Neither flesh nor simple energy, but something thick and viscous, a spiritual mass.
Devour activated.
The phantom writhered, screaming, its form being dragged apart and sucked inward, collapsing into pure mental energy flooding into Bullet's body.
He had only devoured one shade, but already he felt his consciousness sharpening, his resistance to spiritual attacks ticking noticeably upward.
A brand new harvest.
Until now, he had only ever devoured material energy or raw life force. This was his first taste of mental power.
The remaining three phantoms wavered, their forms clearly destabilized.
Ith's real body had gone ashen white.
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